Friday, December 1, 2017

Ideas I am Currently Stealing, Part Five: Persons Non Grata, by Cassandra Khaw

Persons
Non Grata is currently two linked, but entirely stand-alone horror novellas by
the delightful Cassandra Khaw, Hammers on
Bone and A Song for Quiet. The
books are beautifully short and driven, perfect for reading in a single
sitting. I read Hammers on Bone in an
hour on the train, and was extremely sad to have no more to read when I was
done. These books are worth devouring, sharp and dangerous and richly sweet and
broken glass made from honey and butter. They are my absolute favorite pieces
of modern Lovecraftian horror, preserving the power of cosmic horror better
than anything else I’ve read. I want to steal almost everything about these
books, perhaps enough that I should consider simply consuming them whole, to
absorb the entirety of their power. Until I work up the jaw strength and
gastric fortitude for that, here are some of the pieces I think are most
important.

There is
vast terror, and there are small, personal hurts, and both are needed to
sharpen the other. Cosmic horror, the horror of a vast and peopled universe
filled with intelligences that waver between utter indifference and active
malice towards the life of individuals and of humanity as a whole can, and in
Persons Non Grata does, create a pall of dread that heightens the emotion of
reading. But this play on the strings of anxiety cannot become proximate and
sudden without a certain diminishment. In Khaw’s stories, the dread is sharpened
by the pricks of smaller, more ordinary horrors, by neglect, loss, hunger,
poverty, and the pain of lonely, frightened child. These small hurts twist the
knife in skin that universal dread has sensitized, and the confluence is
delicious and terrible. The dread too is made more with these little barbs to
pull it closer. The end of the world is more real when you can see why someone
would desire it, why the building of little pains could make the end of
everything seem like a panacea.

Pain
hurts, and you feel every second. Cassandra Khaw is the finest writer I have
read for describing the experience of physical pain. She makes it hurt, but
spins just enough art into the pain that I don’t white-out and stop imagining
the whole sensation. That’s often how it goes for me. I note that pain is part
of the scenario, but it drifts to the back of my imagination of the scene,
because it’s quite unpleasant. Khaw keeps the pain close and real and hurting
just the right amount. It works so well in these horrors, to make success cost
enough. Even when the heroes win, you can feel the damage, and it keeps
building up. That feeling of pain that stays, victory that costs for more than
scene, is something I am trying hard to learn from Persons Non Grata.

Gorgeous
prose can keep the sharpest edge. Very often, our reflex is to associate
elaborate prose with distancing, with slowness or absurdity. The tortured
thesaurus diving of Lovecraft and his imitators brings a jarring note of
unintended humor to the horror. If purple prose is prose that jars or calls
unnecessary attention to itself with its elaboration, then there is nothing
purple about Khaw’s writing. Her language shines dark and rich and smooth as
molasses pouring from the jar, cuts sharp and raw as a frozen knife breaking
your skin. There is more than enough weight to take it between your teeth and
grind the last drop of flavor out by slow savoring, but the pace of the story
pulls you on faster than that, even through the luxury of language. Not a bit
of Khaw’s prose erodes the horror of her narrative. If anything, it reinforces
it. The lush, vibrant prose reveals more details to disturb, just enough to
make your imagination form a more vivid picture than fainter brushstrokes could
reveal. As you may be able to tell, I have a love for elegant and expansive
writing, and perhaps aspirations to match Khaw’s command of such.

Even in
the impossible darkness between uncaring stars, there is reason for hope. Both
of these novellas are horror, unequivocally, and they deal with both the cosmic
terror of a monstrous universe, and the smaller horror of monstrous societies,
but both, in my reading, end with hope. Even in the face of flesh and teeth and
huge inhuman hungers, the world does not end. Even in the face of pain and
poverty and prejudice, the battered, broken heroes do not want it to. There is
a delicate art to horror on the larger scale that does not lead to nihilism,
but still preserves the balance of terror, and Khaw strikes a perfect note. I
am taking notes on it. The power of hope prevailing, if only for a brief
reprieve, after the touch of more than human darkness is worth all of our
attention, and so is the strength of Khaw’s protagonists, especially in A Song for Quiet, to embrace hope after
the smaller, sharper horrors of their lives.

I will
make no secret here that this entry in the Stolen Ideas series is particularly
special for me. I have discovered Cassandra Khaw only recently, and she has
risen already to be among my very favorite authors. Her prose is spectacular
and engaging and very much like what I imagine my own best work to be. Of all
the authors mentioned and to-be-mentioned here, she is the one I most imagine a
collaboration with, because there is a harmony between her words and my dreams
that I have found with nothing else. Her work, and her delightful twitter
microfictions are well worth everyone’s attention.

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About

R. K. Duncan is a new, hopefully up-and-coming, author mostly of fantasy, with a dash of Sci-fi and horror thrown in. He writes about fairies and gods and ghosts from a ramshackle apartment in Philadelphia. On this blog, he writes meandering thoughts about writing.